First Grade Jitters

We begin our journey into first grade on Monday!  My thoughts are a jumble as I look at our calendar and our curriculum and try to juggle the two.

As I stress over coordinating everything and leaving room for the unknown activities and last minute trips, I am reminded to take a breath--this is homeschooling!!  We don't have a set calendar nor way of doing things.  We can come and go without the confines of a school calendar.  And this year will look even more different than last year.  We've done this before and we can do it again!  We now have two years of homeschooling under our belts--one year of failure (preschool) that we really learned from and one year of success (kindergarten) that showed us that we really can do what God wants us to do so I need to leave it in His hands, not mine!  

I finally have the time (aka last-minute motivation) to sit down with my massively huge Instructor's Guide (have you ever seen a Sonlight Instructor's Guide??) and I'm overwhelmed and wondering how in the world we are going to fit everything in this year.  Then, what about adding in our art and physical education and swapping out Bible curriculum?  And how am I going to get my child to do all of this copywork and language arts when he hates to write?  How is my child going to learn these reading rules when it's like pulling teeth to get him to read (but he loves it when someone reads for him)? 

And then I begin to read the Instructor's Guide for our first History lesson and my worries fade away as God blesses me once again with answering those secret heart desires (Psalm 37:4-5) for cultivating a missional heart within my child.  "...Pray with your children for various peoples around the world.  Most weeks, we read about a specific people group, and several weeks we give an idea to stimulate your prayer times."  The Guide further goes into what missiologists do and the "THUMB" principle to help us remember the top five unreached people groups (Tribals, Hindus, Unreached/unchurched Chinese, Muslim, Buddhists).  The Usborne Peoples of the World book that had me riled up because they depicted life of other cultures in its accurate form (though viewed as complete nudity in my culture and the unclothed instantly became clothed thanks to my black sharpie) becomes a prayer guide as we explore other cultures and use it as a springboard to discover how God's Word is (or isn't) getting there, where His servants are and what we can do to reach everyone for Christ.  Missionary Stories with the Millers by M. A. Martin revisits some of the great missionaries we were introduced to last year in I Heard the Good News Today by C. Lehn.  And George Muller by J. Benge takes us to England where his prayers and faith translated into caring for orphans. 

This is the heartbeat of our family's homeschool as we lay aside some of the traditional textbooks and ways of doing school so we can learn from real men and women throughout history doing whatever God called them to do wherever He placed them.  Our history is rich with big and small people and moments that changed our world, our history and our future (take today, Independence Day, for example).  I want our family to be known as a family that serves God wherever He puts us.  I want my son to grow up as I did with the firm belief in Psalm 32:8, and that God can lead us down some pretty unbelievable paths to reach people we never even knew existed for His glory.  That is something you can't find in the traditional classroom and it leads me back to why we have chosen to homeschool.

So, while I still feel a bit overwhelmed with the technical stuff (reading, writing and arithmetic) and figuring out the best way to tackle it with my child, I find myself purely excited for the first time this summer to start first grade on Monday!

I'm thankful that God keeps bringing me back to the "why" behind homeschool.  Our motivations, reasons and convictions for choosing to homeschool refresh me and keep me committed to the task that God has placed before our family for this upcoming school year!